Jason Horowitz's July 6 piece in the Style section of the Washington Post, "Faith & Politics," was a continuation of the mainstream media's crusade against Michele Bachmann and her family. Half anthropology report from the darkest Midwest, half political hit-piece, Horowitz's article sniped at the Bachmanns' opposition to homosexuality and their strong Lutheran faith.
Jason Horowitz
King Kamehameha's got nothing on Sen. Daniel Inouye (D). The former may have united the island kingdom of Hawai'i in 1810, but the latter's been a reliable vehicle of federal taxpayer pork for the Aloha State for more than 50 years.
That, in a nutshell is the thrust of "Tropical reign," today's Style section front page profile of the 86-year-old president pro tempore of the Senate:
More than any other statesman in the history of these volcanic islands -- more than Kamehameha the Great, who united them into a kingdom in 1810, or Gov. John Burns, who led the political revolution that established Democratic Party rule here in 1954 -- Inouye, 86, has ruled over Hawaii.
As the federal funding he has provided has grown, his political opposition has waned. Hawaiians have voted for Inouye for 56 years, first for territorial representative in 1954, then for Congress in 1959. In 1963, he became the nation's first Japanese American senator. His uninterrupted stretch of service in the country's most exclusive chamber is the second-longest in history behind the recently deceased Robert Byrd, whom Inouye replaced as the Senate's senior member and president pro tempore in June. That position, ceremonial though it is, puts him third in line to succeed the president.
The Washington Post ran a story slamming pollster Scott Rasmussen on Thursday on the front page of the Style section. Political reporter Jason Horowitz earnestly channeled the Democratic spin from the story's beginning:
ASBURY PARK, N.J. -- Here is a fun fact for those in the political polling orthodoxy who liken Scott Rasmussen to a conjurer of Republican-friendly numbers: He works above a paranormal bookstore crowded with Ouija boards and psychics on the Jersey Shore.
Here's the fact they find less amusing: From his unlikely outpost, Rasmussen has become a driving force in American politics.
Democrats surely dislike how Rasmussen's polls (like this week's showing Harry Reid losing by 11 points) affect the optimism of their donors and activists. But are his numbers accurate?
On Tuesday's front page, Washington Post reporter Jason Horowitz reported press secretary Robert Gibbs will eventually be promoted out of that pedestrian job of White House press secretary and become a senior strategist. Team Obama's disdain for their press enablers was a given:
By and large, positive coverage has always been a fact of life in the Obama universe, so it's not surprising that the administration's press secretary, especially one who is personally close to the president, is less interested in wooing the reporters in the room than sparring with them.
Horowitz noted some terse exchanges from several weeks ago between Gibbs and the network correspondents, but suggested that the press was increasingly "anachronistic" and irrelevant and Gibbs' job was "less lofty" than it used to be:
The Washington Post is still having trouble with how the voters rejected their favorite Democrats. The bias erupted in a front page headline on Tuesday:
'Scozzafava' turns into epithet
It's a Grand Old Purging as moderate's ouster spotlights Republican dysfunction
Like most of the leftist illiterati in the U.S., trash novelist Erica Jong has revealed symptoms of what appears to be a mental nervous breakdown over this election. In an interview to the Italian daily Corriere della Sera, Jong fretted that an Obama loss would "spark the second American Civil War" and also that his loss would cause "blood to run in the streets." She also admitted that she was experiencing a "paralyzing terror" about the upcoming election. It seems that those most mentally disturbed by this election inhabit the American far left, revealing a seeming delicately balanced mental state -- or maybe I should say an unbalanced one.
Jason Horowitz of the New York Observer brings us Jong's overwrought blather and also notes that Jong seems to think the same worries are being echoed by many of her jet-setting comrades. Jong notes that Jane Fonda, Naomi Wolf, Ken Follett and others have agreed with her that the world will end if the messiah isn't elected.
